Iraq

“The number of unanswered questions and the White House’s secrecy and obstruction surrounding 9/11 demand a real investigation, not the current compromised inquiry. We owe that to the family members and to all Americans.”

Greens call for Independent 9/11 Probe led by Family Members

by The Green Party of the United States

Common Dreams

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2004

WASHINGTON – April 28 – Green Party leaders renewed the party’s call for an independent commission, with full participation of surviving family members, to investigate the government’s handling of 9/11 and information leading up to the attacks.

“The members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks in the U.S. have pervasive conflicts of interests which disqualify them from leading an investigation,” said Jake Schneider, treasurer of the Green Party of the United States. “The White House did all it could to obstruct a thorough probe, and has so far succeeded. President Bush insisted that commission members be limited to representatives of the two major parties, with each party having a veto, and that the commission could not investigate why 9/11 occurred. The commission’s focus was damage control, not discovery of the truth.”

Greens noted that the 9/11 Commission established two major points: (1) the Bush Administration ignored numerous warnings from intelligence and foreign governments; (2) the Bush Administration used 9/11 as a pretext to enact existing plans for a war against Iraq and to curtail civil liberties in America.

By David Kubiak, May 27, 2004: The 9/11 truth community and our democracy are facing a critical season. The Kean Commission’s public hearings have ended with a whimper – and unuttered concern about issues like the 67 “routine scrambles” that characterized our air defense and FAA/NORAD collaboration the year before June, ’01, or the $100,000 wired to the hijackers in August by Pakistan intelligence, or the three different air war games being coincidentally held on 9/11, or the stupefying repetition of the myth: “Planes as missiles?! Who could have imagined?” The point is that the next few months will decide what, if any, September 11th truth will ever be revealed for many years to come.

The 9/11 community and our democracy are facing a critical season. The Commission’s public hearings have ended with a whimper – and unuttered concern about loud issues like the 67 “routine scrambles” that characterized our air defense and FAA/NORAD collaboration the year before June, ’01, and the $100,000 wired to the hijackers in August by Pakistan intelligence, and the three different air war games being coincidentally held on 9/11, and the stupefying repetition of “Planes as missiles?!? Who could have guessed?” surprise, and, well, you get the drift.

The point is that the next six months will decide what, if any, September 11th truth will ever be revealed for many years to come.

The goal of our efforts here for the next three months should be to expose the truth of 9/11 before the election – or before whatever event is arranged to upstage the election.

And what is “the truth”?

The truth is that from the first, the 9/11 events were exploited without compunction to the benefit of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the Bush cabal. 9/11 was used to justify long-planned invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that may have otherwise been politically infeasible – to push through a long-standing domestic wish-list of repressive measures like the USA PATRIOT Act – and to shift trillions in budgeting priorities from butter to guns. The administration declared a perpetual “War on Terrorism” that “will not end in our lifetimes” (Cheney), which has been waged largely against peoples and countries universally acknowledged to have had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, as with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. As a response to anti-American terrorism, this strategy seems intentionally designed to make the problem much worse in the long run. Before 9/11, the hardliners of Project for a New American Century admitted they needed an enemy. Now they are making sure that there will always be one.

Based on the open-source evidence available to date, the truth of 9/11 is that the attacks could not have happened in the way they did without help on the inside of the U.S. government or within the vast hidden government apparatus. A real investigation (by whatever body) would have… Continue reading →

Why a second Bush term is opportunity, not crisis for the 9/11 movement

By Jeremy Baker

No sensible person would attempt to minimize the gravity of W’s recent re-selection to the highest office on the planet, and the implications of his extended reign is understandably sending shockwaves through the hearts and minds of those who are enlightened enough politically to see through this administration’s hypocrisies and Christianity-abuse.

Amidst this medieval evolutionary backslide it’s understandable that well-meaning social reformers and dedicated 9/11 activists might feel compelled to fold their wings and founder beneath this manufactured, illusory wave of conservatism, frustrated that their simple goal — that this country can emerge from its 9/11 induced coma and right itself again — may remain but a quixotic delusion, the windmills we tilt at having been recently reinforced with DU girded blades.

But I believe, and have said so many times before, that a republican victory in 2004 may not be the disaster that it seems and may, in fact, allow us the protracted opportunity to pursue justice for those who fell victim to 9/11 and the Bushites and finish the job that we spent so much of 2004 beginning. With W and his minions still tight under the spotlight we can deprive our “friendly fascists” of the chance to ride off on their gold plated saddles into an oily Texas sunset.

Editor’s Note:
New Zogby poll finds 50 percent of New York City residents and 41 percent of New York state overall think high officials knew about 9/11 in advance and “consciously” failed to take action…

Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9/11 Attacks and “Consciously Failed” To Act;

66% Call For New Probe of Unanswered Questions by Congress or New York’s Attorney General, New Zogby International Poll Reveals

(Utica, NY) – On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,” according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of +/-3.5.

The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding US government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as “very conservative” supported the claim.

On Friday, October 1st, 9/11Truth activists in New York hand delivered flyers to over 450 United Nations delegates and staffers. The response was incredibly positive. This page contains the text from one of two flyers that were handed out. You can also download the flyers in pdf format.

An Open Urgent Letter to All UN Missions in New York
Given the appalling state of US media, the following facts may be new to you, but these are truths your people should know:

49% of your New York City neighbors believe leaders in this administration knew 9/11 was coming and “consciously failed to act” and two-thirds want a totally new 9/11 inquiry from Congress or New York’s Attorney General. (8/30/04 Zogby Poll)

In September 2000, one year before 9/11, the Bush team”s neocon think tank PNAC (Project for a New American Century) published a plan for global domination called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. (Top Bush Administration figures like Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld et al. were signers of PNAC’s founding charter.) Their plan called for full spectrum dominance over all nations and regions (including outer space), long term petro-resource control with permanent Mideast bases, and a preemptive First Strike policy against recalcitrant states. However, they openly conceded that such a huge “transformation” would take forever “absent some cataclysmic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Sometimes, Mr. Bush, it’s the smallest of details that makes everything click. The smallest of details. Right now, Mr. Bush, I am looking at your watch. It’s an item of clothing accessory and, unlike your other costumes, it is one that is particularly revealing.

On Halloween my daughter would be thirty-three years old. Her child would be almost three. Seven weeks before her twenty-ninth birthday, Vanessa, four months pregnant, ran from the falling towers of the World Trade Center. She did not make it. Her body, and in it the small body of her unborn child, was pulled from the rubble of the fallen towers on September 24th, just ten feet from an alley between towers IV and V. It is important for me to tell you that she was on the phone to her uptown office five minutes after the first plane hit tower I, explaining how she and others in tower II were “safe.”

Here is what you did regarding specifically the events of that morning: You vacationed before, during and after August 6th, the day you were handed the presidential daily briefing that said very clearly Vanessa Lang Langer and many other Americans were not safe. After the first plane hit tower I, the fact of the PDB did not click in your mind, did not cause you to… Continue reading →

The ABC News website has finally acknowledged the existence of alternative research and popular doubts about what really happened on September 11, how and why. We welcome this breakthrough.

We are very pleased that the article by Dean Schabner, published today on the front page of the ABC News website, seems to have fairly quoted two persons among the many citizens pursuing alternative research and actions for justice and full disclosure around 9/11.

We hope that ABC News will follow up with televised broadcasts on this subject, and give a fair hearing to all points of view.

Even as we thank ABC News, we must unfortunately also note that its article adopts a dismissive tone toward doubts about September 11, in advance of full inquiry. The headline is mildly misleading; the unanswered questions about September 11 did not merely “surface” on the eve of Election Day, but have been the subject of untiring work by hundreds of researchers for more than three years and the subject of such best-selling books as The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin and the recent Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert.

No basis whatsoever is given for the assessment of the ABC Polling Unit that the Zogby International survey of New York residents cited in the article (co-commissioned by 911Truth.org) is “not credible.”

Using the same established methodologies as in other surveys regularly cited by ABC News and other major media, Zogby polled a representative sampling of 808 adult New York… Continue reading →

Editor’s note: While ostensibly designed a slam/jeer piece, this is an amazingly ambivalent article that does blurt a lot of facts “out there” that certainly have never been breathed in this paper before. And for 9/11 at that time, we — like Miami Beach — believed, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

Distrust of U.S. Fuels Stories About Source of the Attacks By IAN JOHNSON THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 29, 2003

MUNICH, Germany — Andreas von Bulow’s book has climbed the German bestseller list, his lectures are jammed and, after two years of mounting frustration, his ideas are gaining traction.

His thesis: The U.S. government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a tentative theory, he admits, based mostly on his doubt that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist group launched the attacks.

“That’s something that is simply 99% false,” he said at a reading of his book on the second anniversary of the attacks.

A crackpot? A conspiracy theorist who believes that Elvis lives and the CIA murdered Kennedy? Not exactly. Mr. von Bulow, 66 years old, is a former German cabinet minister, a trim, silver-haired man whose book comes from one of the country’s most prestigious publishing houses and who lectures at well-known public institutions.

He’s not alone: In recent months, Germany’s leading broadcaster, ARD, ran a purported documentary making similar claims, while half a dozen other German authors have published… Continue reading →

Although Libertarians, old school conservatives and progressives have been most active promoting 9/11 truth, their eventual victory will serve almost every conceivable constituency except perhaps the neocons, Dominionists and corporatist right. All 9/11 truth seekers have their own distinct approaches however, and the following is a recent example of the progressive style.

9/11 TRUTH AS KEY
TO PROGRESSIVE VICTORY

10 COMPELLING REASONS TO ADOPT 9/11 TRUTH

AS A PRIMARY THEME
IN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS

“THE ROOT OF COUNTLESS EVILS”

Survey the military-industrial background (and payoff) of September 11th and we can clearly see (and teach) a brief history of our current repression, endless war and fiscal ruin. Their 9/11 lies are still the neocons’ principal source of war-making/rights-taking/vote-raking power. Before they can exploit 9/11 any more we must blow these lies up in their hands. They’ll be left politically maimed and in deep legal jeopardy.

THE BIG PICTURE PERSPECTIVE

There is a strong case that “our” main objective in Iraq was not simply oil or support for Sharon. It was chiefly to replace the Soviet “Evil Empire” with an even scarier foe so the spiraling defense budget would never ever be questioned again. Against that backdrop, the clumsiness, torture and ruthless brutality of our tactics and occupation begin to make sense. In less than a year… Continue reading →

After failing to obtain any competent investigation or tangible results from the 9/11 Commission, the White House, or Congress (many of the governmental personnel responsible for preventing an attack on the U.S. have actually been promoted since 9-11), many Americans are asking whether justice may be obtained through the courts. The answer is complicated, and it would be impossible for a brief article such as this to do anything other than scratch the surface concerning 9-11 justice.

Instead of being the final word on 9-11 legal issues, this article is intended to be an introduction to strategy regarding 9-11 lawsuits, and a practical discussion of how to avoid some of the landmines present on the path to the courtroom battlefield which could knock the unwary out of the game before they even get started.

CAN WE WIN A 9-11 LAWSUIT?

Legally, I believe we should win in court. If the facts surrounding the 9-11 attacks were applied to the elements of the law in a vacuum, then I believe that many of the real 9-11 perpetrators and accomplices would end up behind bars. There is strong… Continue reading →

With the inauguration of George W. Bush for a second term, we enter a nightmare phase of American history, a descent into the era of what might be called “deep politics.”

In this short essay I reach out for an expanded definition of a phrase first coined by the distinguished author Peter Dale Scott. In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK1, Scott refers to the “underlying continuities of deep politics” displayed by the apparent convergence of the covert interests of military, rightwing, intelligence agency, and organized crime conspirators that coalesced in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Veteran journalist Jim Marrs points in a similar direction with his Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, as does the Oliver Stone movie based in part on that book. Marrs then works out the implications in later books, including Rule by Secrecy and Inside Job2, an expose of US government collusion with the 9/11 plot. Big-picture writers like Scott, Marrs, and investigative journalist Mike Ruppert, author of Crossing the Rubicon3, have succeeded in synthesizing a growing body of evidence that support the notion that America now inhabits a surreal realm of deep politics, where amoral, Machiavellian, covert action directs (or conditions) the agenda of the overt world, and cover stories are spun by self-deceived politicians, “pundits,” and mainstream media.

Meanwhile, the truth and the facts about the black-budget world of covert action migrates to isolated ghettos inhabited by independent… Continue reading →

The need to immediately stop political support for the wars on Iraqis, Afghanis, our people here at home and the “War on Terror” as a whole. Specifically, our need for a thoughtful strategy to shut down the political power fueling the entire corporate war machine, a strategy which strikes at the root of that power, and doesn”t scatter our time and energy reacting to its countless symptoms in the field.

b) BACKGROUND

Given the momentum and added troop strength of the corporate forces now in power, we will face unending appeals this year to help combat firestorms on many different fronts.

Already we are struggling to prioritize our efforts to stop war atrocities, torture-apologist appointments, escalating Pentagon appropriations, horrific new weapons, the resurrection of Star Wars, and an apparently imminent draft, not to mention environmental assaults, our ballooning debt, attacks on our rights, the slashing of the social safety net, and a dozen other symptoms spinning out of the sickness at the top.

Alternatively we could step back a pace or two and see where all this carnage connects and focus on a strategy that might stop it all… Continue reading →

From the American Conservative magazine to the Smirking Chimp website, views on 9/11 consequences are starting to converge. Here is a short sharp meditation from the latter source to remind us once more that we are here. – Editor

As the world mourns the anniversary of the Holocaust, we continue to wonder how one of the most advanced countries in the world could commit such an atrocity. We forget that the slaughter didn’t occur overnight but took years to set up. Little by little individuals assuaged their consciences and found it advantageous to go along with authority, committing a number of small acts, ultimately culminating in genocide.

Anyone with a smattering of awareness today questions the path down which our leaders are taking us. Consider the direction. As America pursues an aggressive military policy-Bush’s preemptive strike-invading Iraq and Afghanistan, threatening to bomb Iran and North Korea, and imposing our economic form of corporate democracy around the world, Americans are becoming more nationalistic and more willing to support acts we considered totally unacceptable in the past.

Today our government invades our privacy and mounts the most comprehensive collection of personal data and tracking system of citizens in history. Thousands of cameras observe us. New cars have chips that allow us to be tracked. The military engages in domestic spying and Congress is days away from appointing an Attorney General who justifies torture-newly defined as anything short of death.

A growing military truth movement picks up (and lets off) steam. Wait until they find out how deep the lies go. – Editor

Sean Huze enlisted in the Marine Corps right after the Sept. 11 attacks and was, in his own words, “red, white and blue all the way” when he deployed to Iraq 16 months later. Unquestioning in his support of the invasion, he grew irritated when his father, a former National Guardsman, expressed doubts about the war.

Today, all that has changed. Haunted by the civilian casualties he witnessed, Corporal Huze has become one of a small but increasing number of Iraq veterans who have formed or joined groups to oppose the war or to criticize the way it is being fought.

The two most visible organizations – Operation Truth, of which Corporal Huze is a member, and Iraq Veterans Against the War – were founded only last summer but are growing in membership and sophistication. The Internet has helped them spread their word and galvanize like-minded people in ways unimaginable to activist veterans of previous generations, who are also lending help.

“There’s strength in numbers,” Corporal Huze said. “By ourselves, we’re lone voices, a whisper in a swarm of propaganda out there. Combined, we can become a roar and have an impact on the issues that we care about.”

Those who turn to the groups are generally united in their disillusionment, though their responses to the… Continue reading →

Given the momentum and added troop strength of the corporate forces now in power, citizens will face unending appeals this year to help combat firestorms on many different fronts.

Already we are struggling to prioritize our efforts to stop war atrocities, torturers’ appointments, escalating Pentagon appropriations, horrific new weapons, the resurrection of Star Wars, and the imminent draft, not to mention environmental assaults, our ballooning debt, attacks on our rights, the slashing of the social safety net, and a dozen other centrifugal symptoms of the sickness at the top.

Alternatively we could step back a pace or two and see where all this carnage connects and focus on a strategy that might stop it all at once.

We need what social analyst George Lakoff calls a “strategic initiative” – a plan in which a change in one critical area has automatic reverberating effects in many, many, many other realms.

THE SOURCE OF DARK FORCE

Looking at the onslaughts we face, it’s obvious that this administration’s primary source of war-making, rights-taking, vote-raking power is still and always has been the “official 9/11 story.” The exquisitely timed “surprise attack” it portrays instantly justified what we now know was a long planned agenda to take us into endless war, crippling debt and constitutional twilight.

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. GARRETT). Under the Speaker’s announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. PALLONE) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, earlier this month Congress approved an $87 billion supplemental for the war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. While I believe it is critically important that we get our military troops all the resources they need to safely complete their mission in Iraq, I do not support rubber-stamping this legislation so the Bush administration gets a free ride from Congress.

The Bush administration must account for its war strategy. The Bush administration must also answer the tough questions regarding questionable no-bid contracts, contracts that benefit Vice President DICK CHENEY’s former employer, an employer that continues to pay CHENEY hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in deferred salary, contracts that are free of any oversight from Congress.

Yet another 9/11 “Cui bono?” (who profits?) alert: This is almost ancient news by now if anyone was listening, but this is one of the clearest earliest Congressional examinations of rampant corruption in Iraq. It was a typical after hours empty chamber exercise, but the intrepid Marcy Kaptur did get Cheney’s continuing possession of 433,333 Halliburton stock options and his consequent millions in war profits into the public record at last.

Mr. Speaker, right now Halliburton holds a monopoly on Iraq. The company’s no-bid contract was first negotiated in secret and originally intended for… Continue reading →

Halliburton subsidiary KBR got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq. But even more shocking is how KBR spent some of the money. Former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official Bunnatine Greenhouse is blowing the whistle on the Dick Cheney-linked company’s profits of war.

This time, she was sure, they were going to get her.

Bunnatine Greenhouse had been a huge nuisance since the buildup to the war in Iraq-questioning contracts, writing caveats on them in her spidery script, wanting to know why Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR (formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root) should be thrown billions of dollars of government business while other companies, big and small, were shut out.

And Bunny Greenhouse wasn’t that easy to ignore: she was the highest-ranking civilian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Specifically, she was the officer in charge of ensuring that any work contracted out by the Army Corps to private industry-from help in building bridges and dams and highways to support for wartime troops-was granted in a fair and aboveboard way. For two years, Greenhouse had asked hard questions about why the head of the Corps, to whom she reported directly, kept giving exclusive, non-compete contracts to KBR that now amounted to roughly $10.8 billion. Greenhouse was fearless, and she was blunt. In the Corps’s male hierarchy, it probably didn’t help that she was a woman-or that she was black.